Red Hat Unveils OpenShift Marketplace

Red Hat today announced the forthcoming launch of a new software marketplace for users of its OpenShift Online public cloud application development and hosting platform. The OpenShift Marketplace will provide customers and developers with access to "complementary third-party solutions" developed by Red Hat's OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) partner ecosystem, the company said.

The list of early partner participants includes BlazeMeter, ClearDB, Iron.io, MongoLab, New Relic, Redis Labs, SendGrid, and Shippable. This kind of app-store-like marketplace model has become an essential tool for solution and add-on providers, connecting them more directly with customers of their platform provider partners. The Red Hat version offers a number of managed services for these partners, including a database, email delivery services, messaging queues, and application performance monitoring, among others.

The OpenShift Marketplace is the next step in Red Hat's evolving cloud PaaS strategy, said Julio Tapia, director of the company's OpenShift ecosystem group. The idea is to provide customers "the widest variety of choice when it comes to technologies that complement their OpenShift experience."

"As the OpenShift partner ecosystem continues to expand, we expect the Marketplace to provide developers and customers a more streamlined, secure experience to choose the best third-party solutions for their productivity and business enablement needs," Tapia said in a statement.

The OpenShift cloud PaaS is based on a free and open-source app hosting platform, now called OpenShift Origin, which was developed by Red Hat. The first version of OpenShift was launched as a free beta in 2011 and was aimed at open source developers. It came with built-in management and auto-scaling capabilities that freed developers from stack setup, maintenance, and operational chores, allowing them to focus on coding. And it supported a range of programming languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js, and Perl, as well numerous frameworks, databases, and clouds. In 2012 the company launched an enterprise version of OpenShift and began an expansion of its then nascent partner ecosystem.

Red Hat announced the new marketplace in San Francisco at the four-day 2014 Red Hat Summit, which runs through Thursday.

No date certain was provided for the launch of the OpenShift Marketplace, but the company promised availability "in the coming weeks." Red Hat is also providing a free preview for interested ISVs who e-mail the company with a request.